The conceptual history of nanotechnology is usually traced to a classic talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” that Richard Feynman gave on December 29th 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), which was first published in Caltech Engineering and Science, Volume 23:5, February 1960, pp 22-36. Feynman gave an updated version of that talk on October 25, 1984 during a weeklong experiential seminar at the Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, called “Idiosyncratic Thinking”. He called the talk “Tiny Machines”. A video of Feynman’s 1984 talk has surfaced on YouTube (with an appropriate bongo drum introduction). A hat tip to Wayne Radinsky for passing this along. This 1 hour 19 minute updated speech is similar in content to an updated speech Feynman had given on February 23, 1983 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California to reconsider his 1959 talk in light of subsequent developments. The JPL speech was titled “Infinitesimal Machinery”, edited from a video by Stephen D. Senturia, and published ten years after it was given in the Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems Volume 2:1 March 1993. I found a copy of the article here.
—James Lewis, PhD